


Our GMOs are cruelty free

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [10]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, I will insist to my dying breath that Jade would be the one to bite directly into an orange, TLC compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 19:05:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13196610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: tuesjade prompt: science





	Our GMOs are cruelty free

You're the first one up in the morning, or at least you think you are, until you enter the kitchen and find Jade passed out on the table. There are books stacked up on her left, and on her right her laptop's light blinks on and off slowly to show that it's in sleep mode. Her head rests on a pile of notecards, and someone has stuck a post-it note on her cheek. They drew a smiley face on it. That's kind of cute.

"Rise and shine," you say. Experience has taught you that Jade will sleep through nearly anything, but you think it'd be weird to sit down and have your coffee across from her while she's snoring. When she doesn't respond, you prod her on the shoulder. She shifts, mumbles something, and opens her eyes. "Roxy?"

"The one and only." You peel the post-it note off her cheek and stick it on your own. "You look like you got in a fight with a steamroller and won, but just barely."

Jade rubs her eyes and pulls a notecard out of her hair. "Is that a compliment?"

"Kinda. It means you look trashed, but you're alive, and that's what counts." You settle into a chair across from her. "Bad dreams?" That's what leads a lot of people to wander around the house until they fall asleep in silly places. You found Jake in the bathroom once.

"No, not this time." She squints at your face. You think she's only just noticing the post-it note. Insomniacs would shell out good money to sleep as hard as this girl does. "I was working on a project, and I guess I stayed up a little late."

"Late?" You look toward the window. A faint glow is already creeping in, illuminating the dishes left in the sink overnight. "It's six am. Hark, the rosy fingers of dawn through yonder window break. Morning’s balling up its Millennial pink digits and punching through the glass going wake up motherfuckers, it’s breakfast time."

"Six?" Jade groans and rests her face in her hands. "Last time I looked at the clock it was maybe two."

"You probably needed the rest.” You nab a clementine from the bowl of fruit left on the table. Jade and Kanaya leave it out with more optimism than real hope; most of your household has never eaten a balanced meal and isn’t going to start now. Still, fruit is good, even if the rind leaves your fingers tacky and sharp-smelling. “What are you working on? Something that's a big deal?"

"Kind of." She prods one of the book's spines so they're all lined up. "Rose wants some information on the genesis frog for her walkthrough. Kanaya sent me the DNA sequences for hers, and I've been comparing it to the readouts Dave and I were getting before our tadpole entered the forge. That should give me a baseline, although I guess we can't discount the possibility that the cancer impacted ours too in some way we haven't noticed yet."

You reach over and pick up a notecard. It's covered in scribbled letters - Gs, Ts, Cs, and As. They’re the four nitrogenous bases that help make up DNA, formerly known as the actors starring in Jake’s weird dog journals. "And you're doing this why?"

"I want to isolate which genes do what. We know what Karkat's cancer did to our game session, so we should be able to identify which sequences were responsible by looking at where the frogs don't match. From then on..." She waves a hand sleepily. "We'll have to be a little more creative."

"The Bilious Slick genome project.  Sounds ambitious.” You pop a segment of clementine into your mouth. “But we handled this already, didn't we? The frog is done. The universe is made. Patched, modded, and fit for habitation. We’re in it."

"Other people will have to play this game," Jade says patiently. "They could use a walkthrough on how to understand the frog's properties through the typical user interface."

"In case someone else needs to check to see if their bundle of joy has an evil Jack gene?"

"How to catch those problems before you finish the breeding session and doom the next set of players. That's the idea."

"Seems reasonable." Playing SBURB as designed sucked ass. You forget sometimes that people in this universe (besides Calliope, inevitably) will have the game come calling. It’s only fair to give them every edge you can.

She hides a yawn behind her hand. "I'm looking for the equivalent of Hox genes right now. Or at least I was, before I fell asleep. That seems like the best place to start."

"Hox genes?" The term sounds familiar, but it's been a while since you've boned up on the theory behind ectobiology.

She waves her hands again vaguely. You used to make Drunk Science videos for your friends rambling about ectobiological settings and the finer points of fenestrated plane technology. Half-asleep Harley Hour is less amusing but more coherent. "The best way I can describe it is that they call the shots and tell the body how to build itself. A lot can change depending on whether they turn on or off or misfire. Considering how drastic the changes to our session were, I thought maybe some of those were affected. Although Kanaya didn’t mention the Genesis Frog missing any limbs…"

You nod. "That makes sense. I made a lot of mutant kitties, and a lot of the time it'd be like someone was reading the blueprint upside down or turned over.

"That sounds a little horrifying."

"In retrospect, yeah, kinda.” You tug apart two more sections of clementine and squirt yourself in the eye. “I thought I was hot biology shit, but as you can see, I don't always know what the words mean. The ecto GUI was pretty drag and drop. Kinda like Spore, except you can't just make endless species that look like dicks."

"I've been having trouble myself. Not with making things that look like dicks,” she clarifies. “That isn't one of my priorities."

"Shame."

"I'll leave that to your family." She reaches over and grabs an orange, peeling it absent-mindedly. According to John, they had to train her out of the habit of biting right through the rind. Now that’s something you’d like to see. "It's been hard figuring out what does what without running tests, and I can't keep making more universe frogs! I think I need to hook it up to some kind of simulator so I can see the results in real time."

"You'll figure it out. Aren't you like a science genius?"

She looks away and opens her laptop. "I was a prodigy when I was 12 and most people my age didn't know what physics was. Now I'm sixteen and probably behind a lot of public high school students. My grandpa's books were really out of date too. The human genome project wasn't even finished when he died. Statistical regression, you know? Over time, outliers tend to get pulled back toward the mean."

"I think you're underselling yourself.” You shove the fruit bowl out of the way and lean forward over the table. “Let's see what you've got."

She taps her computer, and the screen lights up. The interface looks similar to some of your old lab tech. Some of the readout looks familiar too. Everyone knows what a DNA sequence looks like - they show up in movies enough. But underneath... "Are those sound waves?"

"That’s right!” She clicks on one of those sections, and it enlarges to fill the screen. “We didn't get all of the DNA sequences from cloning. Besides hunting frogs, we had to explore temples and ruins to find clips of music and then remix them. It was a lot of fun, actually. I wish we’d been able to do my land quest in real time like we were supposed to."

"That sounds weird, but I guess Rose’s quest turned music into DNA too.” You tilt your head, trying to envision what these readouts must sound like. What is the music of the universe? Classical would be boring. You hope it’s punk. “SBURB must have a thing for composition.”

“It’s a good thing we all had some background in it. Or…” She hesitates. “The four of us did. What about you?”

“Dirk thought he could rap, but that’s about it.”

“That’s too bad. I liked sending songs back and forth.” She smiles. “It was like having a conversation without using words.”

That does sound fun. Maybe the four of you would’ve been able to dodge some teen angst if you could’ve written screamers and sent them as attachments to each other. “Maybe you can teach me sometime!”

“I’m a little out of practice, but that could be fun.” She sticks her tongue out at the sound waves on the screen. “I wouldn’t recommend trying to learn from these though. They’re too abstract. Regular notation on a staff is more straightforward, in my opinion. Is there an instrument you’re interested in? I can play the bass, and the flute I guess, but I’m not very good at that.”

“Dunno, is that important?”

“It could affect which clefs we focus on…” She purses her lips, and you realize you’ve unwittingly become the subject of a new Jade Harley Project. She sets off on those all the time, like drawing up plans for a new greenhouse to build in the backyard, or staying up all night trying to sequence the DNA of a creature the size of the universe. It keeps her busy, but you’re not sure you want your musical education to be pursued with that much zeal. “We can go over all of them, I guess,” she continues, “although Rose might understand alto a little more than I do. I don’t see why we need more than two.”

“Let’s make an afternoon of it.” New pet project or not, you really should hang out more – your social circles overlap constantly, so you’re always rubbing shoulders, but it hasn’t been the two of you since she threatened to rip your guts out in the Dersite prison cell.  You won’t let a rough first impression like that stand in the way of a beautiful friendship.

“It may take a little more than an afternoon,” she warns you. “It _is_ another language, more less.”

“Psh, I’m a polyglot by trade. Check it.” You sign a quick carapace greeting to her, and her eyes widen.

“You know that too?”

You pause, hand still in the air. “The carapace finger lingo, you mean?”

Her fingers fumble little, but she signs, “I learned this way Prospitians talk back while I was sleeping.” To get technical, it’s more like, PROSPIT SIGN I LEARN PAST SLEEP I, but you gotta respect them for paring down their sentences to the bare essentials. As it is, conversations can get exhausting. The chess people living in your floating colony talked out loud sometimes, but a lot of the time, hands were easier. A few of her signs are a shade unfamiliar, like the first time you heard everyone’s accents, but you bet that’s because she learned on Prospit instead of from a hybrid mix of refugees from both planets. “I’m out of practice,” she says out loud, “because I didn’t talk to them as much on the ship, but I remember the basics.”

You shake out your hands – you’re rusty too. “Oh, this is gonna be great.  We can talk so much shit on people and they’ll have no idea. Dirk lurked on Derse all the time but never got fluent enough to keep up with me. I’ll help you brush up on that and you’ll teach me music, deal?”

“It’s a deal. But for now…” She hits a few keys and zooms out to show more of the sequences on the screen. “We need to compose a whole universe. Want to help?”

You’ll give her this - when she gets a bug up her ass, she follows through. Your pregame home was littered with half-begun hobbies and incomplete save files. Seeing things to the end tends to be less fun than the glow of starting them. Isn’t how fast your game session derailed a fantastic example? The further you get, the more you notice the problems. You could remind her that this project is the kind of thing that takes years with supercomputers (ok, she kind of has a bit of a computer in her brain, but you hear that’s buried pretty deep). Or you could mention that you’ve got just short of eternity and don’t need to rush. But you get why she’s doing this. You remember a bottle full of ashes sinking into a rainbow sea. You’ve wandered through bubbles with their thousands of ghosts who never got out, who never got to fall asleep at a kitchen table and wake up again for no reason except bad luck.  This is a pet project for all of you now. A pet like GCat, single-minded, contrary, and hard to control. But worth committing to.

“Sure,” you say. “All true gamers make their own world from scratch.”

You’re both still half-asleep and clueless, so you mostly fuck around with sliders for a few hours until everyone else wakes up. “We’re gonna make beautiful music together,” you tell Dirk, because if Jade’s determined to tutor you, you’re not going down alone. He gives you the hunted look of a man who can’t face the world without at least three cups of coffee and doesn’t ask questions.

Coffee sounds good right now, actually. You stand up and stretch your arms over your head. “I’m going to get some caffeine. Want a latte whipped up by your favorite barista? That’s me, by the way,” you add, when she looks blank.

“I wouldn’t mind some tea, actually, if you’re already up.”

“A plant girl. I can dig it.”

She frowns. “Coffee… is also a plant.”

“Don’t put your science between me and my bean juice.” You make your way over to the cupboard and start digging through tea bags. When you look over your shoulder, she’s back to staring at the computer screen, tapping a pen on her bottom lip. You smile. This project isn’t getting done today, or in the next week, or probably even in the next year. You’re all in it for the long haul. But you’re in it together, and right now, even with the whole cosmos available to you, there’s nowhere you’d rather be.

**Author's Note:**

> I based the grammar for carapace sign off ASL, but I haven’t been studying it for that long, so hopefully I didn’t make any mistakes.   
> While struggling with past tense, it occurred to me that Prospitians might deal with tense in interesting ways considering they see glimpses of the future during the eclipse. I wonder if they have a future (certain) to refer to events they’ve seen in the clouds and a future (uncertain) to refer to events they haven’t foreseen. But this is not a fic exploring carapace linguistics.


End file.
